Amex Adds Dining Credit Partners as F&B Businesses Seek to Offer Competitive Rewards

As consumer options for dining proliferate in both digital and physical spaces, food and beverage (F&B) businesses are called upon to work harder to attract and retain customers, rewarding their loyalty and incentivizing future purchasing.

Last week, American Express announced three new partners for its Gold Card Dining Credit program by which consumers can receive up to $10 in statement credits each month for purchasing from a participating business: Goldbelly, Wine.com and Milk Bar. These new entrants join existing partners Grubhub, The Cheesecake Factory and some Shake Shack locations.

For participating partners, the program increases the amount Gold Card holders spend with them, Shibli Juneja, vice president of U.S. Consumer Premium Products at American Express, explained in an interview with PYMNTS. As adoption of the program grows, it opens up new opportunities for these partners to drive sales.

“We know our card members value flexibility and that these partners are popular with them,” Juneja said. “In fact, we’ve even seen an increase in spending over the past several years specifically with these new partners. The popularity of the Dining Credit continues to rise; card member use has increased every year since [the program’s] introduction in 2018.”

A Rewarding Experience

Certainly, rewarding consumers for their spending encourages them to make more dining purchases. According to research from PYMNTS’ January study “Digital Divide: Minding the Loyalty Gap,” created in collaboration with Paytronix, 30% of consumers identified rewards programs as being among the technologies that most encourage them to purchase from a given restaurant.

Read more: Restaurants Compete to Make Loyalty Programs Stand out as Consumers Join Multiple Programs

Additionally, research from the March/April edition of PYMNTS’ Digital Divide series, “The Digital Divide: Regional Variations in U.S. Food Ordering Trends and Digital Adoption,” also created in collaboration with Paytronix, found that 35.3% of consumers from the region had used a loyalty program in the prior 30 days.

See more: New Research Shows That Regional Dining Quirks Matter in Tailoring Restaurant Offers

Noting consumers’ demand to be rewarded for their spending and their tendency to spend more when this demand is met, an increasing number of restaurants have been offering loyalty programs, even those that had previously been holdouts.

Read more: Restaurant Loyalty Holdouts Get on Board as Consumers Expect to Be Rewarded

The New Dining Experience

“While folks are excited to get back to dining out, our [data] showed that many respondents have adopted new dining habits during the pandemic,” Juneja said, noting findings from the American Express Trendex online poll that nearly half of consumers continue to cook more often than before, and more than a quarter are ordering more takeout.

PYMNTS research found that, even since the vaccine rollout brought consumers back into restaurants, off-premise dining actually has remained more popular than on-premise.

According to findings from PYMNTS’ 2021 How We Eat Playbook, created in collaboration with Carat from Fiserv, consumers now are 31% more likely to buy meals for delivery or pickup than they are to dine on-site. Moreover, 43% of all consumers are ordering home delivery for their restaurant meals or groceries more often now than they did before March 2020.

See more: Restaurants and Grocers See Path to Picking up 200M New Customers

As far as home cooking, it is unclear whether the pandemic has increased or decreased the share of consumers preparing meals for themselves in their own kitchens. While certain data sets show a greater rate of at-home cooking, some experts in food and beverage industries contend that the rise in off-premise restaurant consumption, the return to on-premise dining, and the growing popularity of ready-to-eat options have all resulted in a decrease in home-cooked meal consumption.

“The dynamic of the 1950s where somebody would cook six square meals a week and maybe go out once a week is going to be totally the opposite,” Marc Choy, president of Ghost Kitchen Brands, told Karen Webster in a September interview. “This is how people are going to know how to get their food — by ordering.”

Read more: In-Store Ghost Kitchens Turn Walmart Into Uber Eats Competitor

The Return of in-Person Dining

Whether or not consumers are, in fact, cooking more of their meals at home, restaurants are seeing high demand, with post-2020 consumers continuing to relish the opportunity to come together in person, no longer taking social opportunities for granted, and food plays a central role in these gatherings.

“We’ve found that people are excited to explore the world of food again with new and unique dining experiences,” Juneja said. “We know that consumers are looking for ways to connect with family and friends again, and there is no better way to do that than with food.”